Remember the days when your Mum sent you to school armed with a delicious packed lunch ... no me neither!!
Back in my school days it was either home for your lunch or staying for school dinners. For the first couple of years at school I got to walk round the corner from school to home every day and have my lunch with Mum. Usually it was a sandwich or something on toast ... just making myself egg and cheese on toast now takes me right back to those happy days.
Once my brother was old enough to start school Mum got a job as a dinner lady so that she could have school holidays off to look after us, and it was school dinners for both of us. We couldn't get away with leaving anything on our plates or Mum would be told by one of her colleagues. Drat!!
Then years later along came my sons, and yes they did have forays into packed lunches. Gosh it was hard with my youngest, he wanted packed lunches but he didn't like bread or butter so it was always an amalgamation of anything else that I could think of. Lunch boxes weren't insulated in his day so unfortunately I could never send him with leftovers.
Anyway whizz forward far too many years to mention, and here is a photographic representation of my 'unpacked lunches' from last week.
Monday - Pizza made on one of the garlic breads from the freezer ... yum!
Tuesday - I switched lunch and tea around and had some spaghetti with pesto and veggies. (My tea was a fish finger bun with salad.)
Wednesday - A bowl of Vegetable Stew, another switch around with teatime.
Thursday - I had thawed out a roll of puff pastry so I decided to use it all up on Mediterranean Veg pasties, using the odd bit left over to make a jam one for supper time.
They were huge, and reinforced my opinion that puff pastry seems to be all puff and no substance. I won't be buying this again, it will be far better to make my own shortcrust pastry from now on.
Friday - Homemade soup from the freezer with the remaining garlic bread for dunking purposes.
Saturday - My other planned fishfinger bun with leftovers of salad from the fridge.
Today ... Sunday - Another block of homemade soup thawing out ready for lunch. Sadly there is no more garlic bread but I might add a slice of toast.
And now it's time to write out my menu plan for the coming week, once again I will be doing a five-day menu plan as this worked out really well for me last week.
Who knew that one of the hardest parts of being an adult would be to think of what to eat at every mealtime. 😁
Sue xx
I loathed school dinners. We were not allowed packed lunches, till I was 15 and we got a new Head.. My daughters were brilliant - they wanted packed lunches at primary school , so I said they would have to help with planning, shopping and preparing them. And they did! Their children all have cooked meals at nursery & school now, but the girls still get the little ones involved in meal plans & prep for the family meals.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you started a very good family tradition or sharing meal prep, that's a brilliant idea.
DeleteSchool dinner every day from aged 5 to 15. No choices until 3rd year at Grammar school, at least I got used to eating anything and everything! Eat or starve!
ReplyDeleteGosh, I bet you had all the school dinners, from good to bad and all the in-betweens. I used to find things were either lovely, or so disgusting they made me heave.
DeleteHome for lunch with Mum and I was thankful given the comments about the quality of the dinners from my friends! School dinners at secondary school because it was too far to travel home and, to be honest, they ranged from delicious to disgusting.
ReplyDeleteWhen teaching, if I fancied doing dinner duty, I would get a free meal and they were pretty good, to be honest.
And now I can have just what I fancy (or what the budget dictates) and it's always nice.
xx
At Junior School I used to look at the teachers sitting on their table eating the same things as us and wonder why they were daft enough to do that, when they were grown-ups and could have a choice not to. But from an adult perspective I bet they were just glad to have someone else making them a hot meal in the middle of the day.
DeleteWe had free school lunches because of Mum's financial circumstances after dad left, and I hated having to queue up for the free lunch token and then hand it in to the dinner lady in the canteen, marking us out as different from all our friends who paid for their lunches in cash. The embarrassment! Some lunch things were disgusting (overcooked watery cabbage and overboiled carrots springs to mind, put me off veg for years), but others, like a cheese pie, were yummy. And pink blancmange!
ReplyDeleteI remember us having complaints about the free school meal system at my Secondary school and a 'dinner ticket' scheme was introduced. We all queued and bought or got given the same green tickets on a Monday morning and then this was what was handed in for your dinner. Unless you were behind someone in the 'buying ticket' queue you never knew who had a paid for ticket and who had a free one at the canteen.
DeleteAnd a great big fat NO to the horrible pink blancmange, I hated the stuff!! :-)
My brother and I went home most days for lunch and if my Dad was on backshift we had our main meal at lunchtime. At secondary school I took a packed lunch with very few visits to the school canteen when there was nothing in for my packed lunch. My husband takes his “piece” to the Men’s Shed with his travelling mug filled with coffee. Catriona
ReplyDeleteI bet it was lovely the days when you Dad was there for your lunches. Alan takes his travelling mug to the office ... just up his stairs in the house, but at least in that mug his coffee or tea stays warmer for longer. Oh, and he virtually always has a packet of biscuits on his desk to go with it, no wonder Suky sleep under there during the day.
DeleteI would have loved a packed lunch like the one in your first photo. My mum wasn't very imaginative and most days it was peanut butter and marmalade with an apple. Sometimes it was paste or smoked (rubber) cheese always with an apple.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I forgot to say that I too make pizza on garlic bread just like your second photo.
DeleteI would have loved everything except the avocado as a packed lunch. It's a good photo isn't it, I wonder how many kids actually have something like that.
DeleteIt's a good starting point for a tasty pizza isn't it. :-)
DeleteUntil high school I rarely got to eat lunch at school. Winter was usually soup and a sandwich and spring and fall would usually be a sandwich and perhaps a pudding.
ReplyDeleteGod bless.
It's nice that we are all sharing our school days lunches isn't it. Hopefully this post has brought back a bunch of good memories.
DeleteSnap - my mum was a school dinner lady , then promoted to cook in charge for many years and while we were at primary school we had to eat everything on our plates or mum would know about it 😀
ReplyDeleteI've got so many memories of school meals not all of them good by any means but then, the cooks didn't have free reign, a lot of what they dished up was dictated to them ' from on high '. It was the odd ( to me ) things that I didn't like - peanuts mixed into salad, desiccated coconut sprinkled on jam sponge, the skin on top of the pink blancmange.........I could go on and on!!!
Alison in Wales x
I always felt I was being spied on, I can still here the oft repeated phrase 'Joan, your Susan's left her cabbage ...' ringing in my ears.
DeleteThere were so many things that I absolutely hated, prunes, cabbage, yes ... the skin on the blancmange or custard, and the over-cooked flabby things. The only thing I loved was the lovely shortcrust pastry on pies.
😍
DeleteAlison x
It was school dinners for me from the age of 5 until 11, our infant & junior didn't allow packed lunches and as Mum worked there was no option of going home. As the only vegetarian in school it was an absolute nightmare, meat or fish was slopped on my plate and I'd have to pick at the food that hadn't touched it, often existing on a couple of mouthfuls of mashed potato until tea time.
ReplyDeleteAt grammar school we were allowed to take a packed lunch and for the next seven years it was a cheese sandwich on Hovis bread, a Tupperware cup with diluted lemon barley water and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. There was always a Breakaway or a Penguin bar too but I always gave them away!
These days it's packet noodles on the days we have fruit & yoghurt for breakfast and a couple of pieces of fruit on the days we have breakfast in Spoons. In Greece it's a Greek salad & a beer every day & in Spain it's tapas and vino! xxx
Oh gosh, poor you. Kids these days don't realise how lucky they are to have most dietary restrictions met. Ooh Breakaway, I used to LOVE them as a child, a rare treat but a much loved one. I love the sound of your Greek breakfast. :-)
DeleteThe 8 shillings (40p), family allowance, with nothing for the first child, paid for school dinners for four of us at primary school. They were cooked from basic ingredients at the high school in town and delivered in metal containers by van. We grumbled at the greyish mince, stews, and lumpy mashed potato, the gloopy sago and tapioca with prunes, but those meals were nutritious, meeting the required standards for growing children.
ReplyDeleteWe had our third of a pint of free milk too, the Government thought that investing in child health was important.
Now children are getting mainly Ultra Processed Food, where the only aim is for food companies to make a profit, with no thought about the harm it is doing.
I was lucky and Family Allowance had expanded to include the first child from 1975 onwards and I had my first in 1981. It was a very needed amount of money then, even if it was only £3 at first. I've just looked it up and Child Benefit is now £24 for the first child and £15.90 for any subsequent children ... WOW!!
DeleteYou describe the food so well, but as you say it really helped parents make sure their children were getting a hot and nourishing meal during hard times didn't it. I hated the free school milk, it was always icy cold in Winter and horribly warm in Summer ... and I always got told off for blowing bubbles through my straw, well it was the only time I ever got to drink out of a straw and it was fun. :-)
I never had dinner at school, nor had my children. Our school days started at 8 AM and ended between noon and 1 PM, so we always were at home for dinner. We did have a break at about 10 AM, when we usually had a sandwich. For about 20 years now, at most schools parents can choose between "half-day" and "whole day" kindergarten and school, with a dinner usually cooked at a canteen kitchen and heated up at the school.
ReplyDeleteHilde in Germany
That's a completely different system to our English school day isn't it, it must have been good to go home at lunch time and know that school had finished. I guess these days the working parents can choose the full days, it must make life easier.
DeleteI enjoyed seeing your lunches for the week. When I was going to school, we had to bring a packed lunch because there were no school provided meals, only a snack shop. Sometimes, I'd take sandwiches, but, most of the time, it was rice and curries. Much later, the school day ended at 1:30 p.m. and I went home to have my lunch.
ReplyDeleteRice and curry for your school lunch sounds wonderful, and a really good change from sandwiches. :-)
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